This invention relates to a branch compactor for compressing and compacting limbs, branches and shoots from pruning operations as well as whole small trees for convenient disposal or for efficient feed into a wood chipper or shredder.
In modern forest management environmental thinning of diseased, deformed, dead or simply overcrowded trees has enabled healthy, select trees to mature to maximum potential. Special efficient equipment has been developed to harvest, remove and chip the culled waste wood. Wood chips have a variety of uses, such as animal and plant bedding or fuel for energy systems.
The most efficient chipping systems are designed to chip whole trees having trunk diameters ranging from inches, up to several feet. Chipping machines are designed to accept the trees stem first and in some systems utilize a series of cushioned, toothed feed rollers to draw the stock into contact with the chipper blades. In such systems opposed feed rollers part and come together in accordance to the resistence change as individual or bunched trunks diminish to their stem and branch tips. Because of the great inconsistency in such feed stock, the feed rate is controlled by the natural or most effective chipping rate of the chipping blades. The feed rate thus accelerates as the dense trunks of the trees diminish to the divergent branches which are collapsed and contained by the pressure of the feed rollers. Frequently, as the branches are consumed, the chipper is operating far below its most effective and efficient capacity. Attempting to use conventional high capacity chippers for brush or pruning stock is even more inefficient and difficult, rarely approaching the chip rates for which the chippers are designed.
Chipping brush and branches in a foresty operation is usually ancillary to a high volume whole tree chipping operation, and is largely confined to cleanup. In some operations the unwieldy material may comprise the sole or principal feedstock. For example, in commercial fruit orchards huge volumes of pruning are generated annually. Conventional chippers are not equipped to handle such material economically. Conventional disposal by open burning of piled cuttings is no longer tolerated in many areas because of the attendant air pollution.
The branch compactor of this invention solves the problem in the economics of disposing of brush and branch like material by compacting such material into a tight bundle which can be conveniently fed into a conventional wood chipper, allowing the chipper to operate at an optimum capacity.
Where the material is to be transported elsewhere for disposal, the continuously extruded bundle can be bound and periodically cut for stack loading in a disposal vehicle with great savings in space.